While success is surely sweeter than failure, it seems failure is a far better teacher, and organizations that fail spectacularly often flourish more in the long run, according to a new study by Vinit Desai, assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado Denver Business School.
Excerpts (Via Phys Org)
Working with Peter Madsen, assistant professor at BYU School of Management, Desai found that organizations not only learned more from failure than success, they retained that knowledge longer.
“We found that the knowledge gained from success was often fleeting while knowledge from failure stuck around for years,” he said. “But there is a tendency in organizations to ignore failure or try not to focus on it. Managers may fire people or turn over the entire workforce while they should be treating the failure as a learning opportunity.”
Desai doesn’t recommend seeking out failure in order to learn. Instead, he advised organizations to analyze small failures and near misses to glean useful information rather than wait for major failures.
“The most significant implication of this study… is that organizational leaders should neither ignore failures nor stigmatize those involved with them,” he concluded in the June edition of the Academy of Management Journal, “rather leaders should treat failures as invaluable learning opportunities, encouraging the open sharing of information about them.”
It’s hard to learn something online without finding it first on Open Culture (one of my favorite websites)…They just posted a collection of free Harvard extension school courses. Below is one of the courses I’m following.
Introduction (to Sets Counting & Probability -Via Harvard)
This course develops the mathematics needed to formulate and analyze probability models for idealized situations drawn from everyday life. Topics include elementary set theory, techniques for systematic counting, axioms for probability, conditional probability, discrete random variables, infinite geometric series, and random walks. Applications to card games like bridge and poker, to gambling, to sports, to election results, and to inference in fields like history and genealogy, national security, and theology. The emphasis is on careful application of basic principles rather than on memorizing and using formulas.
Lecture 1
Probability, Intuition, and Axioms
Video/Audio
Probability by Symmetry; Probability by Experiment; Payoffs and Probability; Fair Price and Probability; Notation to Combine Sets; Venn Diagrams; Events and Sample Spaces; Event Spaces; Addition of Probabilities; Probability Functions; Inclusion-Exclusion Rule; Many Ways to Skin a Cat
Tagline: In honing your home logic skills, try reducing any argument to its basic premise at the extremes of its subject.
Introduction (Via Peter M. Nardi @ Miller McCune)
Once upon a time, I checked my horoscope just for fun. It simply said: Scorpios are skeptical about horoscopes. Wow! What more could a critical thinker want to read?
Don’t get me wrong. It’s true I am quite skeptical about horoscopes, so by admitting to this, I prove the horoscope true — but then I simultaneously contradict my skepticism. This circular reasoning illustrates the importance of developing arguments that are inherently noncontradictory and that cannot be demonstrated false when carried out to extreme examples.
This simple statement captures the essence of one of the basic tenets of thought: Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction and the absurdity of reducing something to its logical extreme. The law states that something cannot be true and not true at the same time; that would be absurd. It allows a person to ask how meaningful would someone’s position on an issue be if it were taken to its logical extreme.
Additional Excerpt (via Peter M. Nardi @ Miller McCune)
When hearing competing positions held by politicians about health care, for example, or solutions to our economic recovery, take their statements to logical extremes and uncover any potential contradictions. Engaging in a reductio ad absurdum technique and invoking the law of noncontradiction will assist you in critically thinking about people’s arguments on current issues and in dealing with rumors that float around controversial policy plans. And of course actual data often provide some much-needed assistance in the heat of a discussion.
“Here in New York Grameen Bank have people borrowing from us using micro finance and repaying 100% with out any lawyers or complicated due diligence, while across the island in the financial district we have the world’s largest banks with armies of lawyers and they are melting away”
Summary (Via Fora.TV)
Microcredit pioneer and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus shows how he believes the social business model can harness the entrepreneurial spirit to address poverty, hunger and disease. Yunus shows how social business has gone from being a theory to an inspiring practice, adopted by leading corporations including BASF, Intel, Danone, Veolia and Adidas, as well as entrepreneurs and social activists worldwide.
He demonstrates how social business transforms lives; offers practical guidance for those who want to create social businesses of their own; explains that public and corporate policies must adapt to make room for the social business model; and claims that social business holds the potential to redeem the failed promise of free-market enterprise.
Social Entrepreneurship in America is a special series featuring leading innovators and pioneers utilizing entrepreneurial passion and rigor to solve societal problems.
Sir Ken Robinson is one of my heroes. In fact his 2006 talk was one of my first Ted experiences.
H/T Farnam For finding this.. I have a feeling everyone will be posting this soon.
About this talk (Via Ted)
In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids’ natural talents can flourish. About Ken Robinson (Via Ted)
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types… Watch The Video Below or Click Here For Our Subscribers
We preserve the best of the old — books by leading experts, peer‑reviewed and developed to high editorial standards, fully supported by review copies, teaching supplements and great service. Then we change everything. Our textbooks are:
A big congrats to our friend Dan of OpenCulture for making the list! Very exciting.
Wow, there are several resources on this list which I’ve never knew existed.
Introduction (Via NYT)
Thousands of pieces of free educational material — videos and podcasts of lectures, syllabuses, entire textbooks — have been posted in the name of the open courseware movement. But how to make sense of it all? Businesses, social entrepreneurs and “edupunks,” envisioning a tuition-free world untethered by classrooms, have created Web sites to help navigate the mind-boggling volume of content. Some sites tweak traditional pedagogy; others aggregate, Hulu-style.
Connexions, started at Rice University 10 years ago, debundles education for the D.I.Y. learner. Anyone can write a “module,” the term for instructional material that can be a single sentence or 1,000 pages. Connexions hosts more than 16,000 modules that make up almost 1,000 “collections.” A collection might be, say, an algebra textbook or statistics course.
Let’s face it Ed Chancellor is one of my favorite writers. Fortunately, he works with James Montier at GMO. Here’s his latest piece which should be read by all diligent investors.
It is no secret that investors are prone to irrational exuberance. But to many this is only clear after the event. Yet even before a bubble bursts it is possible to show that anticipations for future growth have become wildly unrealistic.
Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota has produced a couple of fascinating new papers* on contemporary forecasting during the British railway booms of the 1830s and 1840s. Railways were first established in Britain in the 1820s. But it was only in the middle of the following decade that a great expansion took place. As railway shares soared, planned new investment in the railway network rose to around 8 per cent of GDP, or more than three times higher than expenditure on US fibre optics during the internet boom, according to Mr Odlyzko.
Favorite Must Read Excerpts (via FT)
The railway manias remind us of the pitfalls of forecasting models, however basic. In addition, there is the problem that prominent forecasters are generally in the pay of promoters. The Victorian traffic-takers turned out to be no more independent than Wall Street analysts of the internet age.
Yet investors need not despair. They should brace themselves against the relentless propaganda of promoters and their brokers. And bear in mind Mr Odlyzko’s wise advice. You don’t need any special skills or complicated models to detect a bubble. All that is required is “common sense, an ability to do simple arithmetic, and knowledge of a few basic facts about the economy”.
Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. They include concepts, usually enclosed in circles or boxes of some type, and relationships between concepts indicated by a connecting line linking two concepts. Words on the line, referred to as linking words or linking phrases, specify the relationship between the two concepts. We define concept as a perceived regularity in events or objects, or records of events or objects, designated by a label. The label for most concepts is a word, although sometimes we use symbols such as + or %, and sometimes more than one word is used. Propositions are statements about some object or event in the universe, either naturally occurring or constructed. Propositions contain two or more concepts connected using linking words or phrases to form a meaningful statement. Sometimes these are called semantic units, or units of meaning. Figure 1 shows an example of a concept map that describes the structure of concept maps and illustrates the above characteristics.
Figure 1. A concept map showing the key features of concept maps. Concept maps tend to be read progressing from the top downward. (image via Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition)
Another characteristic of concept maps is that the concepts are represented in a hierarchical fashion with the most inclusive, most general concepts at the top of the map and the more specific, less general concepts arranged hierarchically below. The hierarchical structure for a particular domain of knowledge also depends on the context in which that knowledge is being applied or considered. Therefore, it is best to construct concept maps with reference to some particular question we seek to answer, which we have called a focus question. The concept map may pertain to some situation or event that we are trying to understand through the organization of knowledge in the form of a concept map, thus providing the context for the concept map.
Another important characteristic of concept maps is the inclusion of cross-links. These are relationships or links between concepts in different segments or domains of the concept map. Cross-links help us see how a concept in one domain of knowledge represented on the map is related to a concept in another domain shown on the map. In the creation of new knowledge, cross-links often represent creative leaps on the part of the knowledge producer. There are two features of concept maps that are important in the facilitation of creative thinking: the hierarchical structure that is represented in a good map and the ability to search for and characterize new cross-links.
A final feature that may be added to concept maps is specific examples of events or objects that help to clarify the meaning of a given concept. Normally these are not included in ovals or boxes, since they are specific events or objects and do not represent concepts.
Concept maps were developed in 1972 in the course of Novak’s research program at Cornell where he sought to follow and understand changes in children’s knowledge of science (Novak & Musonda, 1991). During the course of this study the researchers interviewed many children, and they found it difficult to identify specific changes in the children’s understanding of science concepts by examination of interview transcripts. This program was based on the learning psychology of David Ausubel (1963; 1968; Ausubel et al., 1978). The fundamental idea in Ausubel’s cognitive psychology is that learning takes place by the assimilation of new concepts and propositions into existing concept and propositional frameworks held by the learner. This knowledge structure as held by a learner is also referred to as the individual’s cognitive structure. Out of the necessity to find a better way to represent children’s conceptual understanding emerged the idea of representing children’s knowledge in the form of a concept map. Thus was born a new tool not only for use in research, but also for many other uses.
